Military brass warns against deep cuts

Hugh Lessig

Not all the talk in Washington on Tuesday focused on the need for deep spending cuts.

With Congress locked in a bitter debate over its rising debt, top military leaders warned a House panel that chopping the Pentagon's budget could harm the readiness of a U.S. fighting force that is already stressed.

They found a sympathetic audience with the panel's chairman, Rep. J. Randy Forbes, R-Chesapeake.

Forbes chairs the House Armed Services subcommittee on readiness, and he invited the vice chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force, along with the assistant commandant of the Marines, to discuss the fallout of potential budget-slashing as Congress pursues a debt ceiling increase and offsetting spending cuts.

President Barack Obama asked the Pentagon earlier this year to find $400 billion in cuts to national security over the next 12 years. But with the debt debate going full bore, lawmakers have proposed cuts of $800 billion or even $1 trillion, according to reports.

Forbes, who has railed against the rising military threat of China, said his biggest concern is not a foreign force.

"One of the biggest fears I have is the enormous budget cuts that we see coming down the pike," he said.

He complained that the debate over military funding has focused on how much the U.S. thinks it can afford or wants to spend, not the risk from under-funding.

Dunford said the Marines would face challenges in absorbing its share of a $400 billion cut. If cuts go beyond that, "we would have to start making some fundamental changes in the nature of the Marine Corps," he said.

Right now, Marines meet their needs in Iraq and Afghanistan by pulling resources from home stations. Serious shortfalls at home would hurt the Marines' ability to respond to surprise crises elsewhere in the world, where they must gear up in days or hours.

"Crisis response is come as you are," he said.

The Air Force has seen "slow but steady decline in reported unit-ready indicators," said Breedlove, who echoed Dunford's concern about cuts beyond $400 billion.

Some portions of the Air Force, he said, "are right the ragged edge."

The Army is also stretched too thin, Chiarelli warned. His goal is to give soldiers two years of downtime for every year they are deployed. He just visited an aviation unit where the ratio is 1:1.

Providing adequate rest between deployments has become an issue as the Army struggles to control its suicide rate.

Like the Marines and Air Force, the Army meets its requirements for combat units in the Middle East by pulling resources from elsewhere, he said.

Greenert declared that the Navy's level of readiness is "acceptable," but increased deployment rotations have made it tougher to free up training time.

"The stress on the force is real," Greenert said. "and it has been relentless."